by: David Codrea
“For more than 80 years, the United States has enforced a tough and effective gun control law that most Americans have never heard of,” Alan Berlow claims in The New York Times. “It’s a 1934 measure called the National Firearms Act, and it stands as a stark rebuke to the most sacred precepts of the gun lobby and provides a model we should build on.”
Alan Berlow? So is this going to elaborate on some actual solutions, or does the guy have an agenda?
You tell me. First, note his forum. Yeah, The Times. There’s an honest broker. They’re the ones who offered a lame excuse for not reporting on Fast and Furious. Then they did their utmost to run interference for Eric Holder. Still, it was instructive taking on an entire panel they stacked against me on Virginia Tech in a “How Many 5-Year-Olds Can You Take in a Fight?” kind of way.
And Berlow? He seems obsessed with going after NRA (not always a bad thing, but for the wrong reasons) in anti-gun “progressive” Mother Jones. And it’s not his first time up to bat at The Times.
Still, as much as the medium and the messenger may raise eyebrows, what is it he’s really promoting this time out? After all, ad hominem argument is a logical fallacy. We need to instead examine what he’s advocating.
“Leaders of the National Rifle Association rarely talk about the firearms act, and that’s probably because it imposes precisely the kinds of practical — and constitutional — limits on gun ownership, such as registration and background checks, that the N.R.A. regularly insists will lead to the demise of the Second Amendment,” he offers.
Actually, NRA rarely talks about NFA ’34 because they had a strong hand in the abomination. It’s hardly in Fairfax’s interest to have people reminding them of that (this is what I meant above by “not always a bad thing”).
And as for it being “constitutional,” the reason the feds went after a transfer tax instead of a ban is they knew they didn’t have authority to try for the latter. And as for that registration and tax, the district court in the Miller short-barreled shotgun case agreed that it was a violation of the Second Amendment. It was only after the government appealed to the Supreme Court and no attorney showed up to argue the case, and only the government’s side was heard, that the opinion cited in subsequent cases was issued. And even that had to concede a weapon was protected if it had “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia [or] that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”
The function of the militia, defined as “all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense [and] bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time,” was — and is — to field citizen soldiers. And these citizens must bear arms that are suitable for that purpose, “ordinary military equipment” intended to be taken into “common defense” battles. The militia in the War of the Rebellion did not assemble on the green bearing clubs and spears. They came with the intent to match and best the professional military threat of the most powerful empire of the time.
This is what the American people have allowed to be scammed from them, and what the slick professional wormtongues at The New York Times and other subversive agitprop outlets are counting on the ignorant and the cud-chewers remaining ignorant about.
So here we have this citizen disarmament hack telling a readership he reckons has never heard of NFA ‘34 that we need to extend similar infringements to apply to all gun purchases, and to do that, he pulls another bit of misdirection. He’s also got good reason to be confident most of his readership will never notice that correlation does not imply causation.
Sure, “legal” machine gun owners are extraordinarily “law-abiding.” They filled out the forms, jumped through the hoops and paid for the permission, didn’t they? And with the extreme expense of such firearms due to the limited supply made inevitable by the post-’86 ban, we’re talking a strata of society that can afford individual firearms artificially valued more than the entire collections of many gun owners.
But it’s not just the absence of “machine gun crimes” where such folk prove their trustworthiness. You can bet they also have non-existent rates of rapes, stabbings, liquor store robberies, and you name the violent crime.
So isn’t that proof that only individuals with clean records in that regard should be “allowed” to have guns? That’s already the case. There are all kinds of existing disqualifiers designating people “prohibited persons,” and the gun-grabbers are doing their utmost to expand them to include everyone they view as an ideological threat to their collectivist end game. It’s either that or admit the truth that anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian.
Then, once they have everything down to a small and compliant subset of elite owners who have shown a willingness to submit to prior restraints, be registered, pay fees, obey “requirements” and submit themselves for approvals, inspections, permissions and revocations, all the monopoly of violence needs to do is change the rules. (Curious the spokesman for the NFATCA collector’s group tells The Times “You’re not giving up any rights.” Curious, but sadly, not surprising. Such an appallingly oblivious assertion about rights practically begs for an Inigo Montoya response.)
Give the gun-grabbers a few more years morphing the electorate with that “pathway to citizenship” they’ve been paving and adding lanes to, and they’ll have the legislative and judicial confirmation juice to enact and uphold whatever they want, declaring anyone defying them an “outlaw.” And there’ll be no shortage of hive insect propagandists convincing the dull and the uninformed that not only works, but it’s both desirable and “constitutional.”
https://www.oathkeepers.org
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